> Cash tickets on Student Universe for July 25 Hanoi-New York are $700, but on Amex Portal it’s over $1,000.
It’s too late to buy the ticket. Unlike cash tickets, lowest priced award tickets are available in limited quantities. Usually 0-4 seats for business class, and ~20 seats in economy. The remaining seats are priced dynamically, meaning usually much higher. That’s the delta prices you are seeing. (Also delta very rarely makes award tickets available at lowest price).
The best time to buy a July 2024 ticket was between July 2023 and September of 2023. The window of opportunity to grab economy seats is usually longer (sometimes they never run out), but your target date is in the middle of summer, which is when everyone travels. So they run out, and they run out fast.
If you now search for award seats for May 2025-June 2035, you can find:
Hanoi-Taipei-New York EVA Air Economy using 47k Lifemiles+$80 (Lifemiles is an Avianca Airlines points program, and Amex points transfers there)
Hanoi-Tokyo-New York in JAL Economy using 38k American Airlines miles+$64
But seats priced at that range sold out for this summer.
Your last chance is something people call T-14 tickets. Starting 14 days before flight, when airlines feel their airplane is too empty and seats aren’t selling well, they dump the seats into award seat inventory and suddenly you can grab some seats at lowest price. But that may or may not happen for the specific date that you need and it’s not guaranteed.
On the other hand, if you are very flexible with your travel dates (“eh I would prefer to fly on Thursday but I’m okay with flying Wednesday, or Friday, or Saturday, or Tuesday… It’s all good as long as it’s that week” kind of attitude), then a T-14 strategy can yield a decent chance of success. I just ran a search for the week spanning 6/7-6/14/24 and I see the two flights I mentioned above plus a Air France Hanoi-Paris-Newark flight for 35k Air France points plus $210, a Hanoi-Hong Kong-JFK flight in Cathay for same price as JAL above etc.
One last note, you can’t transfer Amex points to American Airlines so the AA examples are meaningless to you. I’m just mentioning them to illustrate the general ideas that I’m talking about.
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